Hands-On: TweetDeck Wants to Be Your Pro Twitter Client Again

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Hands-On: TweetDeck Wants to Be Your Pro Twitter Client Again

Screenshot of TweetDeck 1.3 by Tim Carmody

I tweet a lot. Even more than I tweet, I'm on Twitter — reading, engaging, linking, tracking news, hanging out. In every respect, I'm a pro Twitter user. And until today, I only very rarely used the best-known "pro" desktop Twitter client, TweetDeck.

But now TweetDeck (which is owned by Twitter) has finally updated to a new 1.3 version that I think I can proudly use and recommend – at least to other slightly mental Twitter users, who, like myself, can take advantage of what TweetDeck can do to monitor a ton of information on a big screen.

Here's how a Twitter spokesperson thinks about the relationship between TweetDeck and the mainstream Twitter client:

TweetDeck provides an experience for people who want a more advanced experience, particularly a more advanced consumption experience. From brands to newsrooms, TweetDeck's multi-column layout offers a quick and easy way for people to keep up with everything they're interested in. This includes their timeline, of course, and also tracking hashtags, keywords and saved searches.

Now, you should know that I am as particular about my Twitter clients as I used to be about my favorite pens and notebooks — which is to say, extraordinarily so. Besides an earlier version of TweetDeck on my desktop at work, I'm a fan of two apps. On my phone, I exclusively use TweetBot. On my MacBook Pro, I exclusively use (and heartily evangelize) a little-known but absolutely amazing native Cocoa app called YoruFukurou.

(And now you know that I’m also a Mac and iPhone user. I fired up TweetDeck in Windows 8 and couldn’t find any differences, but I didn’t perform an exhaustive comparative review on each OS.)

In version 1.3, TweetDeck has basically caught up with YoruFukurou and TweetBot in feature parity. It has YoruFukurou's ability to easily manage semi-custom columns and display media inline. It has TweetBot's native management of Twitter lists, which is pretty much essential to handling multiple columns. YoruFukurou doesn't even have that.

Interactions "shows not only all of your mentions, but also alerts when you have been followed, added to a list, retweeted or favorited";

Activity "shows a real-time feed of all the follow, favorite and add-to-list actions performed by the accounts that you follow."

Both streams match up well with Twitter's similar rebranding moves on its websites and other clients, while still being friendly to TweetDeck's own style. If Twitter's team had tried replacing Mentions with Interactions in TweetDeck (as they kind of did with the Twitter iPhone app), they may have had a user uproar. But as an added option for information junkies, it's perfect.

TweetDeck also keeps the features that have made it beloved by power users for years: scheduled tweets, scheduled accounts, syncing between clients across machines, etc. As far as I can tell, version 1.3 is a purely additive release; nobody is going to be angry at a beloved-if-little-used-feature that's vanished.

Now, not everything in the new TweetDeck is perfect. For the most part, the deficiencies, for me, come down to three long-established beefs I have with TweetDeck: It still uses web tech rather than OS-native application frameworks, it's not very customizable, and it offers a suboptimal experience on smaller screens – like, say, laptops.

Let's start with the bottom and work our way up. In TweetDeck 1.3, you still can't resize columns, either individually, all at once, or dynamically, like in TweetDeck before version 1.0. You might say, "hmm, so what, you can't resize, what's the big deal?" But the inability to resize columns (or for TweetDeck to even intelligently determine what kind of screen it's on and size columns accordingly), leads to foolishness like what's in this screenshot:

This is with TweetDeck in fullscreen on my laptop at 1280 x 800 — a pretty popular resolution setting for 13" laptops. See that ridiculous, column-sized empty space to the right? There's actually another column just past it. I can't get it — unless I resize my window to overlap to both sides of the screen, which is, well, silly.

That's just one thing you can't customize. Besides column widths, you can't change colors/themes; which tweets or updates give you Growl notifications; whether you use quote marks or RT to do edited retweets (even though TweetDeck has switched to the far-preferable "RT" option, it feels like it should be user-configurable); the update refresh rate; or where notification windows appear on screen.

You can customize whether you receive notification windows or sounds for each column, but you have to click on the gear next to each one. Opening the "Preferences" menu item on OS X doesn't actually let you configure very many preferences at all.

This is mostly because TweetDeck isn't a Cocoa app. With version 1.0, it finally ditched Adobe AIR – a sometimes-twitchy runtime that allows for easy cross-platform development at the cost of anything resembling deep OS integration – and is now built in HTML5. But it still can't offer anything resembling deep OS integration.

That means: no keyboard shortcuts or commands, no multitouch gestures, no contextual menus using a right- or secondary-click, and no real menu and configuration items at the top of the screen. And this is why I love YoruFukurou.

My small circle of YoruFukurou partisans and converts on Twitter call each other "NightOwls" (which is what "YoruFukurou" means in Japanese). It's brilliant. It doesn't have TweetDeck's signature multiple-column view, but that actually makes it easier to use on a laptop. Because it's a native Cocoa app, it has a great set of keyboard shortcuts.

It's supremely configurable – almost too much so. You can spend 20 minutes trying to nail down the perfect shade of purple to use for the background in selected tweets. And YoruFukurou doesn't just do inline media; it does inline translation. When you drag a photo into the tweet window, it uploads the photo (according to your chosen photo service) instead of pasting the photo's filename path. It includes a "mark all as read" command, keystroke and user-configurable gesture.

TweetDeck makes you check off messages one at a time, even if you've already read them, just because it's refiltered your results. That's right: Twitter's pro client still can't tell Twitter the service, "Yes, this user has now read these messages."

Now, not every application, especially a social media application, needs a masterful level of user configurability. But not every app is intended for power users, either. TweetDeck is. Or it's supposed to be.

TweetDeck is intended for users who are, like me, both extraordinarily particular and desperately looking for the most efficient way to manage a gigantic, always-flowing torrent of information. And we need something more: not just consumption, but conversation, participation, mastery.

So next week, I'll still do what I always do: read tweets (and Facebook updates) with TweetDeck on my desktop, post tweets with YoruFukurou on my laptop, and keep current on the go with Tweetbot on my iPhone. And my experience reading tweets with TweetDeck on that big screen is going to be a lot better. But it still won't be everything it ought to be.

Update: I'd reached out to spokespeople at Twitter and TweetDeck to ask them about the new app, but because the TweetDeck team is largely UK-based, I didn't get an answer back before the post was scheduled to run. Here are a few interesting things they said:

We want to provide features for TweetDeck's core audience, which includes journalists, newsrooms, brands, politicians etc. We're constantly exploring ways to make it easier for those folks to use TweetDeck as their central app to discover what's happening in the world and to engage with content.

Framing TweetDeck as an app for discovery is both a good way to put it and a revealing glimpse into what Twitter is up to as it thinks about both its service and how its clients can best support it.

I also asked the dev team what their favorite unsung features in TweetDeck were:

Some of our favourite features:

global filter

ability to see someone else's home timeline

Ctrl + Enter to send a Tweet

adding a column for any feed from any user

I'll definitely be adding Ctrl + Enter to my repertoire, even as I not-so-silently lament that I can't configure it to be Cmd + Enter instead. Seriously; it's so close.